IC Skill/Stat Compete Command
Non-Meta, yo

I want to see more stuff like being able to glean the overall quality of someone's outfit. Seemingly minor things like that are going to add more to a non-combative player/character's roleplay enrichment. And over the years that I've been playing Sindome, I've been in a variety of situations where it would have been nice to have a command to supplement contestable roleplay between two or more characters. I'd like to see something like a 'compete' command that tests stats/skills against someone else's with a reasonable degree of randomness. For example:

Betty Lou hosts a milk wrestling competition. Cotton Bob and Silk Pete step in the milk ring and commence to wrestling. They're throwing some good poses and emotes down about locking each other in, grunting and splashing around in the pool. Rather than abusing the grapple command, Cotton Bob could do:

compete against Silk Pete with strength and (whatever related skills).

Cotton Bob beats Silk Pete in a contest of strength.

This could be randomized to a sizeable degree to represent all manner of things so no one can ever have a concise picture of your stats/skills to mitigate the concern for being meta. I just think, at this point in the game, I'm honestly more interested in seeing simple things added to the game that enables and supports players to create more interesting roleplay and represent their stats in variable social situations. All the changes to the game as of late have been massively exciting and sparked my interest in coming back to the game full time, but we still lack for those really tiny things that supports that kind of dynamic, creative conflict.

You can argue that Cotton Bob and Silk Pete can just grapple it out or just emote and pose it, but there's no way to really know who's going to come out on top with the latter without opening a window for someone to try and power play or be meta about it.

There's a whole slew of RP situations where I'd want to see skill/stat challenges that enhances the ongoing scene happening. GMs already have a skill check command, so why can't we get a really dumbed down, non-meta version to enhance our RP!

How do you know the other was low-effort rather than just someone who couldn't write flowery poses like the first player character, but still gave their best effort? That kind of mindset could be punishing someone.

Anyway. It depends on what the compete was. You wouldn't want a compete command to be the make or breaking in that kind of thing: What was the stripper wearing? What's the judges' personal tastes weighed against said stripper? Did stripper wash their ass or piss Judge #5 off 10 minutes before the competition started? Did the judges get paid off?!

With all that in mind, I could still give the winning competition their due props for being able to climb a pole or shake their ass better, and still claim the more favorable prose and effort the other person might've put into the entire performance/clothes/other factors as my favorite.

To me, It's just like this: Britney is (attractive) and has a sub-par description, clothes, and doesn't really emote well. Ashley is (average) and writes all the best poses, descriptions, clothes. Is Ashley automatically prettier because she appeals to your standard of RP? That's ignoring code.

Beauty is subjective and plenty of high charisma characters are not roleplayed as such. If someone shoots themself in the foot by behaving unpleasantly or not putting up the same level of player effort/skill, then that's not much different from a high-UE character failing to win a fight against a weaker character because they were outsmarted by a more skilled player.

@Trickyhottrev The entire point of this is to put a tool in players' hands so I don't have to rely on GMs. Let them tell stories and handle more important things than me wanting to arm wrestle, leg race, or any other variety of situations I'd want to see this in.

I feel like those are all examples that you would never use @compete for as they'd fall under the auspices of coded commands to begin with, pfh. This suggestion was for more fluid and dynamic situations that come up in roleplay. And while I wouldn't hire a television producer who can't structure grammatically correct sentences or poses, I also wouldn't hire them because their artistry mastery was sup-par. Roleplay and stats go hand in hand. One doesn't cancel the other out.

Just like with people who are amazing writers that make clothes on game, I'm not going to buy your shit ICly if I appraise it and it's proven that you don't have the skills to make something of actual high quality and value.

I also won't care how well you can OOCly write prose. If your character codedly sucks at things, they suck at it.

I see the point behind your suggestion, but a system where PCs can do rolls against each other without the inherent risks of those rolls (e.g. combat rolls without actually doing combat) is something that I don't consider feasible for different reasons.

First of all this system would open a lot of doors to abuse and exploits where a group of people circle jerk each other and gauge their stats, this would lead to meta situations due to the leak of information it would enable. The best way to gauge your skills vs. someone else is through organic RP and interacting with the world. This is currently applicable to every single skill in the game. There are organic natural ways in which you can test your skills against real life elements.

Second of all, this is not RP enhancing at all, because there is no way to do it in such a way that the characters are "aware" of where this information is coming from. This is like a magic tool which would allow your character to know information in a situation that might not necessarily adapt to the nature of the acquired information. This is meta. Like I said, there are organic ways.

And last of all, players don't always know what is the current context of the contest. They don't know what are the right stats or skills for a given contest or a given situation under different given circumstances, so it wouldn't even be appropriate, and it might even be misleading to players for many of the situations where they might want to execute those self-indulging, self-service rolls.

This is where you just do xhelp requesting a check, ideally before the actual contest to give GMs some time. I have done it in the past, everyone has done it in the past, and it works. But adding a mechanism everyone can use is simply going to lead to meta and abuse.

And just so you know, it's TOTALLY fine to use the grapple system to determine who wins a milk wrestling contest. There are already THREE checks to determine if you can 1) see a grapple incoming, 2) evade it, 3) get out of it using superior strength, so like I said, this is an ORGANIC way to make that roll using already existing mechanics which implement stat checks, it's not meta at all, it's literally what you are asking but without the opportunity for exploit.